We’ve seen once-fierce political rivals bury the hatchet and become allies in the past; my favorite recent example was Matt Bevin, who ran an aggressive primary challenge against Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell in 2014, reinventing himself as an enthusiastic ally and supporter of McConnell after he won the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2015. In a video at the Kentucky GOP dinner that year, Bevin joked about his sudden about face, playing a humorous video of himself acting like the world’s biggest McConnell fan:
The video, with the 1960s song “Happy Together,” playing in the background, opens with Bevin awaking wearing a “Team Mitch” t-shirt and then stripping it off at the behest of his wife who is doing laundry — only to reveal a second “Team Mitch” shirt underneath it.
…There’s a scene of him smiling and reading “Republican Leader,” McConnell’s authorized biography, and getting a “Team Mitch” logo tattooed on his left arm. At one point, you see Bevin’s half of a phone conversation with McConnell in which he’s acting like a teenage lover — “You hang up first. … No. You hang up.”
With all of that said, I find it hard to believe that Donald Trump would ever select Nikki Haley as his running mate, after denouncing Haley as for much of this primary as “birdbrain” and other juvenile, sneering nicknames. This is what former speaker Kevin McCarthy is recommending, although we should note that he chose to recommend Haley out of a limited selection of options:
During the New York Times’s DealBook Summit, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked McCarthy who the “right person” would be for Trump to pick as his vice president among Haley, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and 2024 GOP presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.).
“If I was a political person, and I was going to advise somebody, you’re going to pick the vice president that’s about addition, not subtraction. So you’re not going to pick somebody that already equates to you,” McCarthy responded.
“Now if I was picking for purely political decisions, what it looks like today is the anti-Trump vote is going to Nikki Haley,” he added.
There’s logic to what McCarthy is saying, but Trump has rarely if ever demonstrated an inclination to appeal to those who don’t already like him, or throw a bone or to try to win over “the anti-Trump vote.” Trump lives to castigate, fume, denounce and destroy “the anti-Trump vote,” not to ever reach some sort of conciliation with it. In Trump’s mind, “the anti-Trump vote” isn’t someone reasonable who you can sit down and negotiate with, like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, or the Taliban.
Yes, Trump flip-flops a lot and often eventually forgives anyone who sucks up enough – Steve Bannon went from “Sloppy Steve” to a full pardon — but there’s little reason to think that by the middle of next year, Trump will be in a mood to forgive anyone who had the audacity to dare run against him for the nomination.
It would make strategic sense for Trump to try to find a running mate who appeals to voters who are skeptical of him; you could make a strong argument that the selection of Mike Pence reassured a lot of Republicans and right-leaning independents who weren’t so sure about Trump in 2016. But everything we’ve seen lately indicates that Trump wants a second term where he is surrounded by loyalists and sycophants. WHoever Trump picks as a running mate has a pretty good shot – 50-50? 40-60? – of being vice president in the administration of a man who will be 78 on January 20, 2025, and who is fond of Big Macs.
To paraphrase felon and governor Rod Blagojevich, that running mate selection is a valuable thing, you don’t just give it away for nothing.